Haegue Yang + Suki Seokyeong Kang at Liverpool Biennial

Liverpool Biennial is the UK biennial of contemporary art. Taking place over 15 weeks across the city in public spaces, galleries, museums and online, Liverpool Biennial commissions artists from around the world to make and present work in the context of Liverpool. The 10th edition Beautiful world, where are you? invites artists and audiences to reflect on a world of social, political and economic turmoil with free exhibitions and events across the city.

In 2018, Liverpool Biennial is celebrating 20 years of presenting international art in the city and region. Haegue Yang and Suki Seokyeong Kang will be exhibiting as part of the UK/Korea year of cutlural exchange.

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, South Korea) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea. Yang’s practice spans a wide range of media, from paper collage to performative sculpture and large-scale multi-sensorial installation, often featuring everyday objects, in addition to labour-intensive woven sculptures. Articulated using her abstract visual vocabulary, her anthropomorphic sculptures often play with the notion of ‘folk’. Her multisensory environments suggest uncontrollable and fleeting connotations of time and place, and experiences that connect us.

For Liverpool Biennial 2018, Haegue Yang has created an immersive environment for her sculpture series The Intermediates (2015-ongoing) in Tate Liverpool’s Wolfson Gallery. Made from artificial woven straw, The Intermediates allude to both traditional arts and crafts techniques and modern industrial production methods. Representing figures and sites from folk tales and ancient traditions, they question definitions of ‘paganism’. Yang’s environment for these works includes recordings of wildlife taken from the British Library’s sound collection, a wallpaper juxtaposing pagan traditions and modern history, and suspended ribbons that evoke folk traditions such as maypole dancing. Her multisensory, hybrid environments suggest fleeting connotations of time, place, figures and experiences that connect ‘folk’ traditions and contemporary culture.

Suki Seokyeong Kang

Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul. Kang deploys various media including installation and video to seek a synesthetic expansion of painting. Through movement and rhythm, she creates an environment that guides the direction of her painting, which she uses like a visual musical score. Her practice is situated between the abstract and figurative, the organic and geometric, creating a visual language of balance and harmony.

Conceived as a visual translation of the Korean musical notation ‘isual tran’, Land Sand Strandis a new multi-part installation by Suki Seokyeong Kang at Bluecoat. The work transforms the exhibition space into a grid. Building on the concept of the hwamunseok – a traditional Korean woven mat, interpreted as the minimum space provided for each individual in society – the piece is activated by performers and the audience. They are given choreography inspired by the Spring Oriole Dance, traditionally performed on the hwamunseok. The movements on the mat serve as the blueprint for the wider installation consisting of painting, sculpture and video.